LEBOHANG KGANYEKe lefa laka

Heir - storyKe lefa laka

Lebohang Kganye

Her-story/Heir-story

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They are kept stashed in wardrobes and chests while a few framed ones decorate room dividers. Some are arranged in albums as if to tell life stories and testimonies and to build identities. Family photographs are more than documentation of personal narratives; they become prized possessions, hearkening back to a certain event, a certain person, and a particular time. But they are also vehicles to a fantasy that allows for a momentary space to ‘perform’ ideals of ‘family-ness’, and become visual constructions of who we think we are and hope to be, yet at the same time being an erasure of reality.

During the course of this project, I initially began navigating my history through geographic mapping, attempting to trace where my family originated and how we ended up in these different spaces that we all now call home. I visited the different locations where my family lived in South Africa and found many old family photo albums. These personal archives varied, some well composed and others typical family snap-shots that were souvenirs of daily life. My grandmother, who is now my living archive, became a vital source of stories that accompanied these albums.

As I went through them I came to realise that the photographs were more than just a memory of moments or people who have passed on, or re-assurance of an existence, but that they were a constructed life. Photographer and therapist Rosy Martin suggests that with regard to family albums, “It seems that in most families mothers are the archivists and guardians of family history, selecting what shall be remembered, what forgotten; constructing a mythology which validates their own ‘good mothering’” (Spence and Holland 1992: 1). This statement rang true with my own personal situation and my project diverted into different threads which explored the personal and collective histories of my family, these being the story of my mother, my grandfather, clan names and my own story.

Her-story

Three years ago I lost my mother. She was my main link to our extended family and past since we all now live in separate homes. Her death sparked the need to trace my ancestral roots. I needed to locate myself in the wider family on some level and perhaps also to explore the possibility of keeping a connection with her. The idea of ‘the ghost’ started to emerge in my work. Like a presence that isn’t, of which Roland Barthes speaks about in his book ‘Camera Lucida’ in which he explores “various photographs from his family album as he searches for a likeness that can begin to represent his feelings for and memory of his mother, who had recently died”. (Barthes, 1981, 96) Barthes describes his feelings as he was looking at the Winter Garden Photograph of his mother when she was five years old with her brother: “There I was in the apartment where she had died, looking at these pictures of my mother, one by one, under the lamp, gradually moving back in time with her, looking for the truth of the face I had loved. And I found it” (Barthes: 1993: 67). Similarly, in my journey I began looking for pieces of my mother in the house. I found many photos and clothes which had always been there but which I had ignored over the years. There she was smiling and posing in these clothes. Unlike Barthes though, I don’t know if I found what I was looking for in these ghostly traces. Perhaps unconsciously I was looking for answers about death and how to overcome it or perhaps forgive it for taking my mother so suddenly. My reconnection with her became a visual manipulation of ‘her-our’ histories. I began inserting myself into her pictorial narrative by emulating these snaps of her from my family album. I would dress in the exact clothes that she was wearing in these twenty-year-old photographs and mimic the same poses. This was my way of marrying the two memories (mine and of my mother). I later developed digital photomontages where I juxtaposed old photographs of my mother retrieved from the family archives with photographs of a ‘present version of her’ - me, to reconstruct a new story and a commonality – she is me, I am her and there remains

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in this commonality so much difference, and so much distance in space and time. “Photographs present us, therefore, not just with the “thereness” of the object but its “having-been-there”, thus having the ability to present a past, a present and future in a single image. In this sense, Barthes argues that they are the modern ways in which we experience the reality of loss and ultimately death. I realised that I was scared that I was beginning to forget what my mother looked like, what she sounded like, and her defining gestures. The photomontages became a substitute for the paucity of memory, a forged identification and imagined conversation.

In these photomontages I try to reflect this emotive process – the absence left by my mother and yet her ever-present-ness in my young sister’s and my lives, as well as our wider family narrative. Her physical absence has not diminished her presence in our lives, and yet, far from this being simply consoling, it is a fact that her death still brings painful memories. As a process of mourning, the photograph can lead one into melancholia – a state of denial, depression, longing, disbelief. But perhaps like Barthes looking at the picture of his mother, we look at the person and see their life trajectory and the fact that no matter how alive they look, the photograph points at all our mortalities – that the essence of my mother that I identify in these photographs is, in fact, my essence, my constructions, my memories and fantasies of this person whom I knew in only one capacity: namely, mother. This project made me consider my mother outside of just ‘motherhood’ but as an individual, fashionable, determined woman, like the beautiful Black women seen in Drum magazine. I am not sure if I ‘know’ my mother any better, but this project seemed to connect three generations of women in my family: my grandmother (as the narrator of family memories), my mother as the object of study, me and my baby-sister (who assisted in pressing the shutter on these restaged photographs) as receptors of this history and its makers as well.

Heir-story

While collecting stories on my mother from various family members, I began pulling out the threads of our larger family narrative. Heir-story traces my ancestral roots through stories that were narrated to me by my grandmother regarding spaces which were inhabited by my matrilineal family members. While the project documents my personal history and straddles generations of my mother’s family, it also resonates the history of South Africa, in that my family was uprooted and resettled because of apartheid laws and the amendment of land acts. These stories also reflect my family moving from place to place during the apartheid era and finding refuge in different spaces around the country, and then creating temporary homes in those spaces. This had a direct impact on the identity of my family as a whole which resulted in our surname changing from Khanye to Khanyi to Kganye, either as an attempt to identify with the different social and physical spaces where my family made homes or because of negligence in recording by law officials. As people didn’t often officially record their own names (or dates of birth), much of our history has been recorded incorrectly or simply remains unwritten.

This led me to exploring my family’s ‘izithakazelo/ direto’ (clan names or praise songs) - every Black surname has its own praise songs which give a stage to present family genealogy. Others are derived from the names of our grandfathers and siblings from the fathers’ side of the family but as my father was not part of my life, I inherited my mother’s surname Kganye. These songs become a passing on of the family’s oral tradition which connects one with their culture and history. Historically izithakazelo is something that has never been contained, and isn’t frozen; it is spoken and it is part of evolving vernacular culture. It isn’t written down, but rather passed down orally and each person says them differently. Genealogist, Kimberley Powell states, “Oral histories are stories told by living people about the past. Generally, these are stories of their own life

1. ‘ Khanye’, ‘Khanyi’ or ‘Kganye’, the word in Sotho and Zulu means ‘light’

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and the life’s of the people around them. Often an oral history includes details and stories that exist no-where other than in the individual’s mind.” The more I researched my family history, it became apparent that identity remains a space of extreme contradictions – in a way an experiment; it is a mixture of truth and fiction; a blending and clashing of histories and stories gathered, a malleable entity with the pretence of ‘fixedness’.

My grandfather represents the central patriarchal figure in the project. He passed away before I was born and we carry his surname (despite the spellings variations; my grandfather as Khanye, Grandmother as Khanyi and my surname as Kganye). He was the first person in the Khanye family to move from ‘di’plaasing’, which means ‘homelands’, in the Orange Free State to the city in Transvaal to find work because he didn’t want to be a farm labourer like the rest of the family. As apartheid was ending and the majority of the family moved from the homelands to seek work in Transvaal, they temporarily lived in his house in Johannesburg which was at the time one of several cities in the province of Transvaal. As a result everyone in the family has stories about my grandfather, and even though I was born in ‘his’ house I never got to know him except through stories passed down from family. So the project is also about being at the same place at different times and not meeting.

For this project I enact these stories of my grandfather to construct a visual narrative, in which we meet, through the use of life-size flat-mannequins of the characters related to me in various family stories. In these fictive narratives I am the only ‘real’ person, taking on the persona of my grandfather, dressed in a suit, a typical garment that he often appeared wearing in the family photographs. It is perhaps not surprising that with my father an active absence in my life, I sought to identify with another father-figure and directed this at my mother’s father, dressing in his clothes and ‘walking in his shoes’ (both over-sized).

This work also testifies to degrees of absences in that I did not know my grandfather any better than my own father, but yet feel the need to identify with him while ascribing a level of rejection to my own father. As a young woman enacting a patriarchal figure in a family, I address the shift in my role as a woman, having to be a provider and protector of the family since my mum’s death, by assuming the role of a man that most of the women in my family have had to take on because of the absent father figure. So we have had to learn to become these roles and by taking on the persona of my grandfather, I also perform a degree of masculinity associated with certain provisional roles. I write these scenes in my Sotho language which adds to the element of fantasy because it is a visualisation of how I imagine their memories, the stories that are shared with me which I carry with me and transmit so that I become an active participant in keeping these memories alive, as well as identifying with and contributing to them.

This photographic journey seems to be a deep response to loss and mourning – not just of different individuals, but of history, language and oral culture. ‘Her-story/Heir-story’ is about memory, fantasy, identity formation and performance, and provides a means for re-constructing my identity by reconnecting with family members (both alive and dead) and exposing a wider common history. Through the process of attempting to trace this history, I have discovered that identity cannot be made fully tangible just like the products of a camera; it is a site for the performance of dreams and the staging of narratives of contradiction and half-truths as well as those of erasure, denial and hidden truths. A family identity therefore becomes an orchestrated fiction and a collective invention. While these images record history, it is only a history imagined. I will choose which part of the fantasy to take with me and claim as my story.

2. Powell, K. Oral History Step-by-Step, Why Oral History? http://genealogy.about.com/od/oral_history/ss/oral_history.htm. Accessed 20 May 2013.

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References

Adams, S. (2012). Family Ties: Recollection and Representation. Unpublished paper presented at Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory at the IGRS Senate House, University of London: March

Barthes, R. (1981). Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. New York: Hill and Wang

Borrowed Dogs: The Richard Avedon Foundation, (As it appeared in Richard Avedon Portraits, 2002)

Dowmunt, T. (2003). Mother Pictures: Autobiographical Video Work in Progress. London: Media and Communications, Goldsmiths College, University of London.

Diserens, C. (2011). Chasing Shadows: Santu Mofokeng, Thirty Years of Photographic Essays. Munich, London, New York: Prestel Verlag.

Martin, R. (1999). Too Close to Home? Tracing a familiar place: Rosy Martin. Paradoxa: International Feminist Art Journal. Vol.3. January. pp. 73 - 80

Rugg, L.H. (1997). Picturing Ourselves: Photography and Autobiography. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Schmahmann, B. (2004). Through the Looking Glass, Representations of Self by South African Women Artists: Exhibition Catalogue. Johannesburg: David Krut Publishing

Spence, J and Holland, P. (1992). Family Snaps, the Meaning of Domestic Photography. London: Virago Press Ltd

Spence, J and Solomon, J. (eds.) (1995). What can a woman do with a Camera? Photography for Women. London: Scarlett Press

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Nontobeko Ntombela & Mary Sibande

Using self-representation to question and define our notions of self, we relate to later selves, thereby constituting personal identity; we also relate ourselves to others, thereby constituting collective identity. In relating earlier and later selves to each other we seek to make sense of our experiences. [...] But we also relate earlier to current selves in order to place ourselves in the present. (Coullie, et al 2006: pp.1)

Lebohang Kganye’s project is about a search for identity, identity not only on the basis of race, but also through her ethnic genealogy and the complexes of living in Johannesburg, a hybrid society, as a young Black woman in a post-Apartheid period. Through her family history Kganye maps out where she exists within this family and community, which in turn relates to her identity. Judith Coullie, Stephan Meyer, Thengani Ngwenya and Thomas Olver’s above quote offers an important understanding of how self-representation is a critical underpinning method of self-insertion and how this search for Self is invariably imbedded in the framing of individual identity. This idea of self-insertion also speaks about a space of collective selves and the notion of community. In that way, the position of an individual is firstly connected to a family, then to a clan, a community, and thereafter to a nation. What Kganye’s project proposes is an unfolding of her identity in relation to her family and at large an identity of a young South African Black woman. This is a very challenging task, as we know, that South African history is porous with contradictions and that such a task is faced with the challenge of being able to navigate through these contradictions in nuanced ways. Kganye’s strategy to engage with the family history also necessitates enquiries into the archive that she explores through personal interviews with her family and family’s photo albums. This process in itself presented other challenging dynamics about the functions of archives. Just as Carolyn Hamilton, Verne Harris, Michele Pickover and Graeme Reid, articulate in the book Refiguring the Archive, about the function of archives when they write:

For the archive is also always already being refigured; the technologies of creation, preservation and use, for instance, are changing all the time; physically the archive is being added to and subtracted from, and is in dynamic relation with its physical environment;

organizational dynamics are ever shifting; and the archive is porous to societal processes and discourses – although at certain junctures, like the one South Africa finds itself now, formal conduits need to be put in place. (2002: 7)

Underlying this statement is the implication that archives, by their ever-changing nature, are limited and complex. What these editors allude to is that archives often do not reveal easy answers, but instead raise more questions about the information they contain. They suggest that archives must therefore be approached critically when attempting to understand, argue, and analyse them. Kobena Mercer (in an interview essay by Gilane Towadros about archives) further complicates this archive function where he argues that “[…] if you look at history, at the archive, its never as clear-cut as inclusion and exclusion, there’s always a revolving door […]” (2004: 257). Kganye’s project of excavating her family history through personal interviews with family members and family albums thus sets up an interesting challenge in the way that complicates this family’s archive. Furthermore, the use of her own body to reference this archive thereby employs a strategy of autobiography, and in that way begins to bridge the archive’s limitations. Through the story of her mothers’ life and that of her grandfather, Lebohang Kganye invites us to experience her identity, the earlier and later selves, and at the same time reminds us that her history is a typical South African story, and one that many people can relate to.

Philemon Khanyi as we know him through Lebohang Kganye

There seem to be a few contained pathways explaining the journey of a man with many surnames. Lebohang Kganye attempts to illuminate such a narrative with the eyes and means of being the granddaughter of such a man. Kganye attempts to retrace and re-imagine the story of her family by activating the archives of family albums and through interviews with people who knew the man personally. In this way, Philemon Khanye, Lebo’s grandfather, becomes a trace of this past with which Kganye leaps into the present.

Tierney Fellowship exhibition “Ke lefa laka”

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Philemon along his journey gained and lost different forms of identity as different clerks wrote and rewrote his surname changing it from Khanye to Khanyi, and then to Kganye. Philemon was only ever recorded as Khanye, but when he got married, his wife’s surname was recorded as Khanyi despite the fact that she was taking her husband’s surname as her own. They later had children, and all their children’s surnames were recorded as Khanye except Lebo’s mother whose surname was recorded as Kganye. Years later Lebo’s surname was recorded as Kganye as well.

The name changes raises many complex questions about identity, yet leave residues of her grandfather’s move to the Transvaal (Gauteng), specifically Johannesburg. These names have Zulu, Xhosa and Sesotho derivatives, giving the impression of a man with many lives. This idea speaks about apartheid history and the context in which black people lived during those times. The South African economy controlled by the cheap labour Apartheid system forced many black men to leave their families in the rural areas in order to make a living. Often they were given short-term contracts that would be re-written for a different service. These contracts exposed them to many administrative errors over which they had no control.Kganye’s grandfather experienced this history. The surname Kganye is thus a result of the influences and transformations of the past.

The story Kganye gives us is a glimpse of this past. She stages the journey through her photographs, working with images of the family members who followed her grandfather to the Transvaal. It is here in this work that she goes back and forth through time, questioning her existence as reflected by this varying surname. In reconstructing the story of her grandfather’s migration, she works in a studio populated with cardboard cut-outs and enlarged black and white photographs that are reconstituted and become sculptural images. In this environment she performs, stages and re-enacts her desire to be part of what she could never fully experience. The work questions and references the various interpretations of the family name, and

reconstructs this history through photographs, but more particularly through Lebohang Kganye’s viewfinder.

References

Coullie, J. L. et al. (eds.) (2006) Selves in Question: Interviews on Southern African Autobiography: Writing Past Colonialism. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

Hamilton, C. et al. (eds.) (2002) Refiguring the Archive. Cape Town: David Philip Publishers.

Tawadros, G. (eds.) (2004) Contemporary Art and Ideas in an Era of Globilisation. London: Institute of International Visual Arts.

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Original family album photographs of Philemon Khanye and Maria Khanyi, Ke lefa laka, 2013.

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Her - storyKe lefa laka

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© BAHA Drum Photographer

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Fouad Asfour

Shadows of the archive

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The work “Her-story/Heir-story” builds up layers of images and connotations. What appears as everyday family album photography is altered, superimposing the artist’s shadow on her deceased mother as if seen through a half-mirror. Other shadows are added as invisible layers, visual references such as Drum magazine photography and stories of the artist’s grandparents. This way, the work links a critical discourse around representation, visual culture and contemporary image production pointing to forms of photography which are not credited, questioning the archive and overwriting aesthetics of a canonised art history.

While these concerns are shared globally in visual arts, for artists working on the Other side of theory of art and (post-) colonial studies tackling racialised stereotypes in the “traffic in photographs” means much more than a theoretic concern with visual studies, but rather “Wrestling with the Image” as Christopher Cozier (artist and publisher of the Caribbean platform for criticism, Small Axe) phrases it: facing ubiquitous doppelgänger images from a hegemonic visual culture. Working within the ambiguous space of visibility of racialised stereotypes, artists are not only confronted with their own practice, but also challenged with the visible products of a colonially informed exoticising gaze on “Africa”. To work in the shadows of this visibility creates a curriculum of its own for young and upcoming visual artists: While the South African context provides many pointers in the history of using art for liberation, anti-apartheid struggle and emancipation, artists and cultural producers of the post-1994 generation face challenges in working between a hegemonic White art history,

global representations of “African Art” and the local context. Rediscovering new archives, investigating how representations are used in and reveal identity politics, and how official and silenced histories of art and culture are traded in a globalised cultural production In this context, raising questions about identity, difference and claiming particularity demands to stake out a visual discourse of one’s own. For young visual artists, this means creating their own curriculum, using critical race and feminist theories, insurgent art movements and learning to examine the significance of the international discourse in theory of art and post-colonial studies for one’s own artistic practice, as well as how it refers to practice based and lived experience. Engaging with different kinds of sources, information and strands of theory, image making becomes another form of shaping a body of knowledge gained from a reflected practice.

Memory eclipsed by rememory

In her work, Kganye explores how remembering and commemorating is related not only to memory, perceiving, and imagining but also elaborates on subjective experiences when bringing to one’s mind past events, using autobiography as a resource for her work. In examining the intricate connection between the conscious personal memory and the shared but silenced awareness about past events, her photographic practice could be seen as a recovery of images and restoration of the significance of family images. It is difficult to locate her practice within a theoretical frame not only because the work treads on new territory, but also because it opens up new questions about the South African visual art discourse.

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On the surface, the work interrogates the genre of family photography, media and the role of the imaginary in memories, how they come into existence and what they are made of. While the genre of family photography binds the works together, the images themselves evoke imaginations of and associations with popular culture, activism and newspaper journalism, such as Drum magazine, anti-apartheid struggle photography, and theatre or TV productions. By inserting herself in the staged photography, Kganye investigates not only identity and the purport of the viewer’s gaze towards an image such as in the works of artists such as Cindy Sherman or Samuel Fosso, but also raises questions about the social role of photography, the normative dimension of photography as “vehicles of a fantasy” in the family album, and the role of memory, memorising and recollection in public images.

Pierre Bourdieu suggests in “The Cult of Unity and Cultivated Differences” that the function of family photography is to “revitalise and recreate the group” and to supply “the means of solemnising those climactic moments of social life in which the group solemnly reaffirms its unity” . In this context, however, the socio-psychological economy of gender assigns “the wife the responsibility of maintaining relations with the members of the group who live a long way away, and first and foremost with her own family” and therefore he concludes that “photography should be the object of a reading that may be sociological, and that it should never be considered in or for itself, in terms of its technical or aesthetic qualities.” Surpassing these reflections, gender appears in a different constellation as the work is based on a matrilineal oral tradition. This tension between

social and individual memory which is opened up in Kganye’s works needs to be located within the larger socio-political context of the generation of South African artists who came after 1994 and which necessitated questions about the theoretical frame of Black writing about art.

To locate the artist’s use of family photography as visual practice in her work, one could look at the series by Santu Mofokeng, Black Photo Album/Look at Me, 1890-1950 (1997), a collection of portraits of ‘urban middle-class Africans in South Africa’. Okwui Enwezor points out that it was motivated not only to show images which do not conform to stereotypic representations of “Africa” but that it also opens up a “discourse around the social rituals of the photographic image.” Adding to this knowledge of rituals around the photographic image in “Chasing Shadows” (1997), Mofokeng refers to an awareness which is raised in viewers concerning the meaning of ‘shadow’ in Zulu. ‘“Seriti/is’thunzi’ can refer to “anything from aura, presence, dignity, confidence, power, spirit, essence, status and or well-being”, or “imply the experience of being loved or feared”, but also has an active dimension as one’s ‘seriti/is’thunzi’ can be positive or negative and can exert a powerful influence.”

In a similar way, the work “Her-story/Heir story” not only interrogates photography as autobiography in the context of a contested visual culture but also elicits a silent awareness in viewers when it comes to memory and recollection. In her essay “Memory, Creation, and Writing” Tony Morrison formulates something analogous to this particular awareness: “Memory (the deliberate act of remembering) is

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a form of willed creation” which is different from “an effort to find out the way it really was – that is research.” In this process, the act of remembering includes omissions and memory comes together in pieces, as evocations of emotions, disconnected fragments of glimpses into situations, carried by smell, sound, or ideas resulting from any possible combination between senses and imagination.

This way, rememory is an image made up of narrations which links fragments, its presence is linked to different states of mind connected by memory. Being present in its evocation it manifests itself in different ways. Memory here is not merely a passive wax slab where a stylus leaves marks behind as conceptualised by Sigmund Freud, but rather roams around on an ever moving and fluctuating landscape where borders between today, tomorrow and yesterday, constantly shift, framed by an interaction of perception and emotion with imagination and reality and negotiated against the constant impact of the inexpressible, unmentionable and silenced. For Sethe, the protagonist of Morrison’s novel Beloved, the persistence of what cannot be forgotten includes the rememory of what happened to others:

“And you think it’s you thinking it up. A thought picture. But no. It’s when you bump into a rememory that belongs to somebody else. Where I was before I came here, that place is real. It’s never going away. Even if the whole farm – every tree and grass blade of it dies. The picture is still there and what’s more, if you go there – you who never was there – if you go there and stand in the place where it was, it will happen again: it will be there for you, waiting for you.”

Heir-Story

Readers of the novel will draw from their own experiences when it comes to rememory, of how ‘thought pictures’ are evoked when witnessing something and when giving reign to the imagination while listening to other’s stories. For Morrison, rememory is deeply political. In her text “Memory, Creation”, she clarifies:

“If my work is to confront a reality unlike that received reality of the West, it must centralize and animate information discredited by the West – discredited not because it is not true or useful or even of some racial value, but because it is information held by discredited people, information dismissed as “lore”, or “gossip” or “magic” or “sentiment”.”

Morrison speaks about the conditions of memories which are located around the absence of images and of language, which are evoked through the deafening silence of suppressing, not uttering and not giving any form to something. These silences, however, create a kind of negative imagery which Santu Mofokeng speaks of, and which can be located in Morrison’s realm of memories of “discredited” people. Images then, which are not anymore about “documentation” or “authenticity” but about the very conditions of utterance.

Kganye’s work opens up a new approach towards discussing the kinds of unvalidated forms of knowledge “held by discredited people”. And while a photographic image raises a different kind of awareness and different silences in different people, it also creates a field of shared imagination. These sparks of recognition and reminiscences in the

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audience – about their own history or when imagining narrations of their own family history, their ancestor’s arrival in the city – open up poetic dimensions of rememory of/for others, and ultimately spaces of in-between.

Footnotes

1. The title refers to Santu Mofokeng’s work “Chasing Shadows” (1997), accessible at: http://cargocollective.com/santumofokeng/chasing-shadows

2. In the text, ”The Traffic in Photographs” (Art Journal, Vol. 41, No. 1, Spring, 1981, pp. 15-25), Allan Sekula elaborates how the discourse around photography (which is “the forceful play of tacit beliefs and formal conventions that situates us, as social beings, in various responsive and responsible attitudes to the semiotic workings of photography”) invisibly links language and power and thus maintains a “specific ideology and practice of representation” giving concrete form to other “discursively borne ideologies: of “the family”, of “sexuality”, of “consumption”, of “government”, of “technology”, of “nature”, of “communications”, of “history”, and so on.”

3. In: Luc Boltanski and Pierre Bourdieu, Photography. A Middle Brow Art, Cambridge and Oxford: Blackwell, 1998, pp. 13-72.

4. ibid., pp. 20-21

5. ibid., p. 22

6. Okwui Enwezor, Chika Okeke-Agulu, Contemporary African Art Since1980. Bologna: Damiani, 2009, p. 37.

7. Santu Mofokeng, “Chasing Shadows” in: Santu Mofokeng. Chasing Shadows, ed. by Corinne Diserens. Munic: Prestel, 2011.

8. The connection between Morrsion’s novel and this work was first drawn by Sharlene Khan curating the exhibition “Rememory”, Goodenough College, London, February-March 2013.

9. In: “A Note upon the ‘Mystic Writing Pad’”, General Psychological Theory, Chapter XIII (1925).

10. “Memory, Creation, and Writing.” in: Thought Vol. 59 No. 253, December 1984, p. 388 .

The Suit, 2012

List of exhibited works

Pied Piper, 2012

The Alarm, 2012

The Wheelbarrow, 2012

The Bicycle, 2012

The Last Supper, 2012

Ka mose wa malomo kwana 44 I, 2012

Kwana Germiston bosiu II, 2012 Ke monahano ke ntse ke le pating II, 2012

Tshimong ka hara toropo II, 2012

Sefateng khoneng I, 2012 Ke eme ka diaparo tsa sekolo II, 2012

Moketeng wa letsatsi la tswalo la motswalle II, 2012

Habo Patience ka bokhathe II, 2012

Ngwana o tshwana le dinaledi I, 2012

Ke tsamaya masiu II, 2012 Jwang ba hae I, 2012 Ke tswa intsha ka thatohatsi yaka ya mose o botala ba lehodimo II, 2012

Kwana Germiston bosiu I, 2012 3-phisi yaka ya letlalo II, 2012 Kwana borayeng Phadima II 2012 Re tantshetsa phaposing ya sekolo II, 2012

Mokete wa letsatsi la tswalo la ho qala wa moradi waka II, 2012

Ka 2-phisi yaka e pinky II, 2012Lenyalong la Thobi II, 2012

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Re intshitse mosebetsing II, 2012

Setshwantso le ngwanaka II, 2012

Jwang ba hae II, 2012 Ke le motle ka bulumase le bodisi I, 2012

Ka 2-phisi yaka e pinky I, 2012

Hekeng ya kereke II, 2012 Ke bapala seyalemoya bosiu ka naeterese I, 2012

Bodutu feela I, 2012

Sefateng khoneng II, 2012 Tshimong ka hara toropo I, 2012 Ka mona leboteng la moahisane I, 2012

Ke dutse pela dipalesa II, 2012 Hlakeng ya kereke I, 2012 Re shapa setepe sa lenyalo I, 2012

Setupung sa kwana hae II, 2012Ka mose wa malomo kwana 44 I, 2012

Bodutu feela II, 2012Ke le motle ka bulumase le bodisi II, 2012

Ke bapala seyalemoya bosiu ka naeterese II, 2012

Ke bala buka ke apere naeterese II, 2012

Re shapa setepe sa lenyalo II, 2012

In 2003 the Market Photo Workshop and The Tierney Family Foundation established The Tierney Fellowship to support emerging artists in the field of photography. The aim of the Fellowship is to identify aspiring photographers, create opportunities for photographers and assist them in overcoming the challenges that many face at the start of their careers. The Fellowship provides the successful applicant with the financial support necessary to research and produce a body of photographic work, in consultation with a mentor, over the period of a year.

In July 2012 Lebohang Kganye was selected as the recipient of the 2012/2013 Tierney Fellowship. Lebo joined a growing list of recipients that comprises of Tracy Edser (2008/2009), Simangele Kalisa (2009/2010), Thabiso Sekgala (2010/2011) and Mack Magagne (2011/2012). A panel of judges appointed by the Market Photo Workshop, including panelists from The Tierney Family Foundation, participated in the selection process. The judges were pleased that Lebo’s project proposal experimented with something interesting and ground-breaking in terms of form. The Tierney Fellowship also ensures that rather than simply gaining a grant, the emerging photographer is afforded the support and guidance of mentors, who are often also able to assist the photographer in gaining a foothold in the broader photography community, in developing networks and growing relationships. Nontobeko Ntombela and Mary Sibande (seasoned artists with a wealth of expertise and ideas to develop emerging photographers) were selected as Lebo’s main mentors. Nontobeko and Mary worked on a one-on-one mentoring process with Lebo, helping her to refine her ideas, offering advice and often acting as a sounding board.

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All images © Lebohang Kganye from the series Ke lefa laka

Drum image courtesy of Bailey’s African History Archive

Exhibition held at the Market Photo Workshop.Market Photo Workshop is a division of the Market Theatre Foundation

Market Photo Workshop:John Fleetwood, Molemo Moiloa, Bekie Ntini, Bongani Njalo, Bafana Zembe

2 President Street NewtownEntrance Bus FactoryJohannesburg 2001PO Box 8656 Johannesburg 2000

+27 11 834 1444 T+27 11 834 1447 F

www.marketphotoworkshop.co.zainfo@marketphotoworkshop.co.za

Text:Nontobeko Ntombela & Mary SibandeFouad Asfour

Publication design:Shogan Naidoo

Special thanks to Tierney Foundation, Market Photo Workshop, Nontobeko Ntombela, Mary Sibande, the Kganye family, Lawrence Lemaoana, Sharlene Khan, Fouad Asfour, Allan Kolski Horwitz, Silvertone